First inlay attempt

Well, I might be getting a little over confident with four projects all turning out to be more than I expected…. So I’m attempting a advanced v carve inlay and I finished the pocket today… I’ll be working on the inlay tomorrow if I can wait that long… which reminds me to be more patient with this new hobby… I tend to be in a hurry a lot and since I’ve purchased this cnc I believe I’m settling down (when I remind myself)…here’s the picture of the pocket and will post pictures of the inlay tomorrow…


I forgot to mention, this is a practice piece from scrap wood…see, I’m learning… lol

6 Likes

There is something to be said for slowing down. I was making a template for a friend and he asked for a change. This afternoon I made the change and saved the files. I mounted the material on the CNC and decided to eat dinner before cutting it out. About 5 minutes after I decided to cut a little bit later he called and made another change. So being a little bit lazy saved me from cutting the project twice. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

4 Likes

Very nice! Don’t forget to flip the inlay!

1 Like

Thanks, that’s a great reminder for sure… I was using a surface bit to flatten my walnut stock, manually, and gouged the stock so I had to go back into cad and rotate it around the hole I made… whew… I had just enough room…

An old toothbrush will really help cleaning those fuzzies out of the pocket before setting the plug in. You don’t want a fish with fuzzies on the inside… :fishing_pole_and_fish:

1 Like

When I surface a board with 1" McFly I program a contour cut that goes from right to left, then up a half inch, and left to right. Repeat so the whole board is covered.

1 Like

That’s great, I do it somewhat the same but I really don’t know how to have it start from the edge of the board. It always seems to do a plunge and then does a back-and-forth tool path around in a circular direction.

@WillAdams calls it the traveling salesman. The erratic movements are baked into the C3D software. There are several things you can do to help speed up. The main one is to set your retract height to the minimum you can. The up and down movements are shortened and speed up your overall cutting time. Files with a lot of vectors tend to do a lot of up and down movements and setting your retract height to a minim helps shorten that up and down movement. On multiple tool path jobs always order them so internal cuts are done first. Then move out from there and finish with a contour cut out. This helps keep your material clamped down better even if you have tabs. Most tabs are only a fraction of the coverage of your material when you wait and cut the cut out last. I use painters tape and super glue so I dont have to have tabs. I find it tedious to remove tabs. Some projects are so large it requires tabs over the painters tape and super glue. However I have cut 24" x 24" projects with painters tape and super glue because there were many internal cut outs inside and that made sure they did not get thrown out and possibly dislodge the larger material. The router has a lot of force when it kicks a part loose. Most of the time my router is spinning at 18,000 RPM and a router bit can throw a mean fastball.

One way to make the tool path start from outside the material is to make your material larger than your actual material. The raster path some people draw starting outside the real material will make your router cut from outside your material and then follow the raster tool path.

I started the polyline at the lower left outside the actual material and zig zaged around to the top left corner. If you do a contour with no offset the tool will follow the line. Just set a surfacing depth to 0.010" (or whatever depth you want and set tool depth to this depth by editing tool in toolpath) and make sure the lines are half the distance of your tool width.

1 Like

This is what I enjoy about this forum… thanks for sharing…